The Lesser-Known Reason Therapists Don’t Talk About Their Lives
And it’s not just out of respect for your time
When we meet people, we imagine all sorts of things about them. Yet we don’t pay much attention to how these fantasies impact our relationship with them or our behaviour towards them.
Likewise, patients will inevitably generate a fantasy in their minds about the therapist’s life. Only this time, there is (almost) no other information to go on because of the lack of information about the therapist’s personal life (we can talk about the therapist having a social media presence in another post). This means that the fantasy says more about the patient than about the therapist. And this is potentially useful information for the treatment.
Scenario 1
A patient who has conflicts with perfectionism may need to come to terms with my own imperfections as a therapist. Naturally, this patient starts therapy with an idealizing fantasy of the therapist. This fantasy must be maintained until the time is right to dispel it. I do that by going by-the-book and being a “blank-screen” therapist for a while.
If I disclose that I struggled with a similar issue, I could be miscalculating that they just need to hear that their struggle is ‘normal’ and they’re not alone. They don’t need a therapist to tell them that; what brings them to me in the first place is usually the misconception (fantasy) that the one who can help them is the one who is unlike them.
Even something as seemingly small as forgetting information the patient reported from the previous session could have the unintended consequence of the patient leaving at the first sign of deviation from the fantasy.
In time, however, I’ll begin to reveal my humanity by prefacing with “remind me…” or simply admitting that I forgot. My admission that I forgot is – unconsciously for the patient, and in that particular time – the treatment in and of itself.
Scenario 2
The patient develops a romantic attraction toward the therapist. The therapist’s anxiety about the patient’s feelings pushes him to disclose that he is taking a vacation with his wife in the coming weeks, which, in turn, determines whether the patient’s feelings wane, remain the same, or intensify, depending on the patient’s psychological makeup.
If the patient’s feelings remain the same or intensify, the therapist still has a shot at noticing his own anxiety and addressing the patient’s feelings directly. That usually means interpreting the attraction as an emotional defence to, say, pursuing a romantic relationship with those outside of therapy, where it can feel less safe for the patient.
It also means that the therapist and patient have a chance to talk openly with each other about the patient’s feelings and still maintain ethical boundaries when all is said and done. This models for the patient (for the very first time in many cases) the experience of addressing sensitive or emotionally charged issues with another person and coming out of it with the relationship intact, if not stronger.
If the patient’s feelings wane after hearing that the therapist is married, however, the therapist may have lost the chance at working through the patient’s anxiety.
The therapist must be extra vigilant about this type of disclosure if the patient has a history of stormy relationships or infidelity.
Scenario 3
The therapist takes time off abruptly, and a patient reacts angrily. If the therapist had disclosed that the reason was to tend to a family emergency, he risks rationality kicking in for the patient and stopping the feeling in its tracks. Perhaps the patient would have imagined that they were abandoned for sunny beaches; this would have given them an opportunity to work on the patient’s feelings of abandonment underneath the anger.
Scenario 4
The patient believes that the therapist cannot empathize with them due to their disability, unbeknownst to them that the therapist suffers from an invisible disability. If the therapist discloses his condition at the outset of therapy, it robs them of the opportunity to work through the patient’s unconscious expectation that they can never be understood.
None of this is to say that the therapist should never disclose. Nor is it to say that the therapist shouldn’t provide a valid excuse for taking time off abruptly. But that therapists need to be aware that every disclosure, big or small, can take the treatment in different directions, and we need to be able to assess – often in the moment – the impact of our disclosures.
We also need to be able to look at our own feelings and question our own desire for disclosure (the countertransference) and decide if it serves to advance the treatment. All in a split second.
As a psychoanalytic therapist, I see disclosure as potentially spoiling whatever the patient imagines about me throughout the course of treatment. In other words, disclosure narrows the space of exploration of the patient’s inner world, limiting the patient’s deeper understanding of him/herself and the capacity for meaningful change.
